In the news this month: the world’s premier security conferences, Black Hat and DEF CON, take center stage to open August; more advanced persistent threats emerge in China and elsewhere; malware is using webmail to communicate; and a bizarre tale surrounding a brief outage on Sony’s PlayStation Network. Threatpost’s Brian Donohue and Chris Brook review these stories and more in this August 2014 edition of the Kaspersky Daily podcast.

In the news this month, Microsoft stirs controversy with its latest botnet takedown, China spies on the U.S. seeking information about policy in Iraq, Verizon’s latest transparency report suggests the government is most interested in location data, and hackers compromise defense contractors involved with Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile system.

June was a busy month, so Chris Brook and Brian Donohue will discuss hacks and data breaches affecting a number of prominent brands, some interesting privacy and cryptography news from the tech giants, and, of course, we'll check in on the mobile security scene as well. However we begin with Heartbleed:

Chris Brook of Threatpost and Brian Donohue discuss the security news happenings from the month of May, including good and bad news for privacy from the tech giants, an inordinate number of data breaches, the emergence of mobile ransomware, and more:

In the news this month, a serious security vulnerability – dubbed Heartbleed – emerges in OpenSSL, one of the Web’s most widely deployed cryptographic tools. Microsoft ships the last security fixes to its once-ubiquitous Windows XP operating system. Apple resolves its own similar but separate cryptography vulnerabilities. In addition, we've got more data breaches and, as always, more Android news.

In the news this month: more transparency reports, Microsoft zero days, data breaches, and NSA revelations. WhatsApp – the popular global messaging service – is acquired by Facebook, much to the chagrin of privacy advocates. There’s continued trouble for critical infrastructure systems, as well. A lot of great news stories out of CanSecWest and the affiliated Pwn2Own contest. Brian Donohue and Chris Brook discuss these stories and more.

Firefox mandates in its latest update that all Java plug-ins will operate on a click-to-play basis.Google removes a key privacy feature and fixes a serious vulnerability in its Android Operating system. American Retail giant Target suffers a massive data breach, exposing some 40 million credit and debit cards. Brian Donohue and Threatpost’s Chris Brook discuss all this and more in the December monthly news podcast.